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Is there a doctor in the opera house?

jprime@gannett.com
Published 4:02 p.m. CT July 4, 2015

Dr. Glenn Fernandez in the emergency room at University Health.(Photo: LSU School of Medicine in Shreveport)

But at least for one recent Shreveport resident, it’s where they sing and hear applause.

That’s the case for Dr. Glenn Fernandez, a 33-year-old Alexandria native who just wound up a three-year residency at LSU Health Shreveport and worked in the emergency room at University Health. His journey through medicine and the arts has taken him throughout Louisiana, to Italy and California and, where he’s now returning with hopes of making his mark not only in health care but in opera.

“I’m in medicine because of my mom, who is a radiologist and put it in my head since I was a little kid,” he said. “The music part just popped up. I started playing the piano when I was 10, then the cello, but the singing started when I was in college.”

He attended Tulane University in New Orleans for both undergraduate studies and his medical degree, splitting the stays with a year in Milan, Italy, where he indulged his love for the operas of Verdi and Puccini, finally earning his MD in 2010. Then he spent two years in California where he earned his masters in fine arts and sang with the opera.

“That’s how I made ends meet, but it was difficult, very difficult,” he said. That led him to determine he had to finish his residency. “I was getting lots of roles, and getting nice opportunities with the opera and high-profile companies but it was difficult to make ends meet. I realized I had to have two careers.”

California Mobile Physicians will be “my ‘waiting tables’ job,” he joked. “They know I’m a singer. I was choosing between two big companies and they were able to give me a schedule I could pick and choose on my own.”

He also had to re-establish arts connections in a very big, active and competitive arts town.

“I have those connections but I have to do the whole audition circuit again,” he said. “I have an agent who will take me back for the TV and stage stuff, but it’s still just a matter of auditioning like other actors out there.”

“The first is a stroke education video that I created while I was a student at Tulane School of Medicine,” he said. “Each student had to do a project related to family medicine. We were encouraged to do something research related — boring — but I decided to make this video instead. I drew the animations, played the background music and wrote the script, and I got one of my classmates to do the voice acting.”

“I was invited to sing with them by one of the French horn players, Brooks Teeter, who is a nurse in the ER,” he said.

In his final local performance at Centenary College’s Hurley School of Music in mid-June, he sang two pieces, “Ecco ridente in cielo” from Rossini’s “Barber of Seville,” and “Si, ritrovarla io guiro” from the Italian operettist’s “Le Cenerentola,” or “Cinderella.” Both were well received by the small but appreciative crowd, and the singer ended his final rendering with a presentation of flowers to his longtime teacher, Janice Aiken.

“He chose some very difficult music,” said Aiken, adjunct voice instructor at Centenary and opera workshop teacher at Bossier Parish Community College. “He has a voice that is unusually suited for it. Very florid, that music requires technical skill. He has a beautiful voice and the range and flexibility to sing that kind of music. And he’s an incredibly dedicated student and hard worker.”

LSU Health physician Dr. John Felty, Fernandez’s attending physician as assistant professor of emergency medicine, was one of the appreciative fans at the Hurley recital.

“It was a surprise to find out he was the caliber of singer that he is,” Felty said. “When you hear his regular voice and then hear him sing it’s a bit of a disconnect, because he has such a rich voice and can manipulate it so much. You wouldn’t know that just from talking to him on a day-to-day basis.”

The hospital will miss Fernandez, Felty said.

“It was a pleasure to work with him and we love Glenn,” he said. “He’s a very compassionate doctor and a pleasure to be around.”